


Guardian Angel

by Dusana



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Guardian Angels, Beta Wanted, F/M, Getting Together, Mutual Pining, Title of Your Sex Tape
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 12:41:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30122934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dusana/pseuds/Dusana
Summary: Amy Santiago is a guardian angel, sent to earth to protect the fine people of the 99th precinct.Jake Peralta is a detective, pining for his partner.Neither of them could have predicted the consequences a smuggling case would have on their relationship and their lives.
Relationships: Jake Peralta/Amy Santiago
Comments: 5
Kudos: 26





	Guardian Angel

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo... this is my first english fanfiction, since there isn't really a following for this series on my "native" platform and many jokes don't really work when you try to translate them.  
> That being said, _please_ tell me if you find any mistakes. I read and reread this multiple times but I'm still not sure that I didn't miss anything.  
> Should anyone be willing to properly beta this for me, I'd be delighted.

Guardian angel

“Guardian angels are sent to earth to protect their humans. Some angels are responsible for entire villages, while others only have to look after a handful of people. Very few humans are protected by their own angel they don’t have to share with someone else. 

To maximize efficiency, angels often take the position of influential people who can help many humans through their work. Most angels end up being community workers, teachers or working for the fire department, in a medical institution or the police.

Since angels are able to hide their wings from mortal eyes, humans aren’t capable of distinguishing a human from an angel. An angel, on the other hand can always see another angel’s wings. 

Keeping their identity secret is important to any angel. If their celestial being is revealed to a human in their care, they will be called away from earth and reassigned to someone else. Should their celestial being be discovered by an outsider, their memory will be wiped.

Guardian angels have very limited powers as long as they are hiding their wings. Those skills include a heightened sense of any danger their wards are in and the ability to speed up the healing process of any wounds a ward may suffer from. Once they take the full form of a celestial being – thereby revealing their wings to the human eye – an angel gets access to a multitude of powers, including, but not limited to, great strength and speed and a very high tolerance to pain. This almost always leads to them being extracted from their assignment, never to be seen by their former wards. 

Relationships between angels and humans are not explicitly forbidden but are heavily frowned upon. This is due to the deceit and the heightened risk of the human learning of their partner’s true form. The third reason, which is rarely discussed, is the risk of the angel falling in love with their human spouse too deeply and neglecting their duties as a guardian.

It is roughly estimated that there is one angel for every 20.000 humans. Of course, those numbers are highly speculative, since …”

Rosa hits the off button on the radio. “Boooring. Why are you listening to that stuff?”

She looks around at the people in the break room. 

“Because it’s interesting!”, Charles exclaims. “Listening to an actual angel talk about their life…”

Rosa sits down next to Jake who just shrugs. “You know how he is with this stuff.”

While Charles rambles on about angels, Jake glances over to Amy, who has been very still since the piece on angels had begun. Since Rosa had entered the room, his partner had stopped moving altogether. She has a book in front of her and had been reading, but she should already have finished this page and the next but has yet to turn her page. Not that Jake was paying attention to how fast Amy was reading. That would be crazy.

Amy looks up and meets his eyes which causes Jake to jump in on the conversation with Charles as to not be caught staring at his partner. 

“From all the police officers in the NYPD, who’d you think is the most likely to be an angel?”, he asks the group.

Charles immediately jumps on the new direction the conversation is taking.

“Well, Holt doesn’t seem too human, do you think?”

Jake waves it away. “He’s not an angel, he’s a robot. What about Terry? Someone who works out that much definitely has a secret.”

Rosa shakes her head. “Can’t be. He has a wife and three kids. Angels don’t procreate on earth. What about Gina? She seems… otherworldly.”

“Very nice way of calling her crazy, Rosa. But as much as she would love to know that you called her otherworldly, Gina is very human. I’ve known her since we were five. Angels usually just pop up in their early twenties with little to no social connections from their childhoods.”

“What about Rosa?” Charles jumps in. “We don’t know of any childhood friends of hers.”

Rosa levels a glare at him. “So?”

Charles visibly flinches. “Nothing. Just saying.”

“Santiago, what’s your guess?”

Amy looks up from where she was still staring at the same page in her book and raises her eyebrows in confusion. “What?”

“Angel in the NYPD, what’s your guess?”

She shrugs. “Don’t know. Isn’t that kind of the point of their secrecy?”

“That’s why you are supposed to guess. You’re no fun.”

For a moment, her expression changes and he thinks she looks hurt. But before he can think about it further or say something else, one of the uniformed officers appears in the doorway.

“Detective Peralta?” Jake turns away from his partner and towards the young man standing in front of him. “Patrol just picked up Jess Branders.” He gestures to a man in handcuffs who is being escorted in the bullpen by two officers.

“Who’s that?”, Rosa asks as Jake stands up.

“Murder suspect I’ve been chasing for a week”, he answers. 

Amy looks at the man in handcuffs, then at Jake. “He’s innocent”, she simply states. 

Jake stares at her. “No, he’s not! He was at the scene of the crime; he knew the victim. He did it and I will prove it.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thank you”, he huffs out and leaves to talk to his perp.

_Amy doesn’t watch him as he leaves. Her eyes are set on the pair of light green wings sprouting out of the back of the man sitting patiently at Jake’s desk._

\----------------------------------------------------

“You still need to tell me how you knew that Branders was innocent”, Jake demands a couple of nights later while he sits down next to Amy at Shaw’s.

He found the murderer thanks to the intel Branders had given but was still unsure about how Amy could have known.

True, Amy sometimes just has these hunches that turn out right. She has an amazing array of CIs, has a knack for finding the best witnesses at a crime scene and once in a while she would look at a person, make a statement about whether or not they were guilty of a certain crime and almost always ended up being right. 

He has absolutely no idea, how she does that and it baffles him. Not that he isn’t amazed by her anyways – all the time.

After he and Sofia had broken up five months ago, he thought that now might be his chance to be with Amy. She wasn’t with Teddy anymore and when they were at that inn with Sofia and Teddy all these months ago, she all but admitted to having romantic feelings for him. But then came the case they worked with Majors, Amy went on a date with the detective from the 93rd and came back with her new rule: she doesn’t date cops.

And – to Jakes chagrin – she stuck to that rule. The few dates she had been on since then had been set up by her friend Kylie and had nothing to do with work.

Jake has since resigned to (not so subtle, according to Rosa) pining. If Amy doesn’t want to date cops, that is her decision to make, and Jake will respect that. He does not necessarily like it and there are moments when Amy looks at him when he thinks that she might reconsider, but she stands firm on her rule and he respects that. So he tries very hard to bury the romantic feelings he has for his partner and just be her friend.

Amy is blankly staring at him. It takes Jake a moment to register the empty beer bottle in front of her. He throws an arm around her shoulders and gestures to Hank for another bottle. “Let’s get another drink in you”, he says. “I think spacey Amy is bored.”

Amy skips the two-drink phase of being loud thanks to Rosa showing up and doing a round of shots with them.

Soon, Jake is watching his partner clumsily dancing to the low music of the bar. 

Rosa nudges him with her shoulder. “You really should be over her by now.”

Jakes shoulders sag in defeat. “I know. I’m trying.”

“Do you…” Jake heaves a deep breath. “Do you think there is any truth to the Cupid-theories? That the angels sometimes choose a soulmate for their ward and they end up together no matter what?”

It takes a long moment for Rosa to answer. “No. I think we get to make that decision ourselves. But even if the winged freaks have something to say about it, it doesn’t matter.”

Jake raises his eyebrows. 

“She made a decision, and you have to live with it. You can’t put your life on hold, hoping that she might change her mind one day – celestial intervention or not.”

Before Jake can answer, Amy makes her way over to them. She is panting lightly from her dancing, her pupils are blown wide, and she grins at him and Rosa as she gestures for another drink. 

Jake excuses himself and goes over to Charles. He is having a hard enough time keeping his hand to himself in his lightly drunken state. He doesn’t know what he would do were he to be confronted with Pervert Amy.

And while Charles starts talking to him about food and restaurants, he completely forgets that Amy still hasn’t told him how she knew about his suspect’s innocence from the beginning.

_At the other side of the bar, Amy does her best to remember that she was sent to protect these people and is not supposed to develop romantic feelings for one of her wards – let alone act on them._

\---------------------------------------------------------

Jake is still half asleep when Amy gets up from her seat one Thursday morning to take over the briefing. The flatscreen in front of them shows a grainy picture of a man at an airport.

Amy gestures towards the picture. “This is Jan Neufers”, she begins. “He is the head of a smuggling ring I busted some years ago. He managed to flee the country with most of his money and we suspect that he built his organization back up again while he was off the grid. He was seen leaving the airport yesterday. I will go and talk to his old contacts, hopefully one of them has an idea where he might go.”

Captain Holt nods from his position on the other side of the podium. “Very well. Take Peralta with you.”

Amy nods at the Captain and throws a quick smile in Jakes direction. 

“Anything else?” Holt looks around the room but only receives shaking heads and blank stares. “Dismissed.”

While everyone else disperses, Jake approaches Amy. She hands him a folder which he opens and quickly rifles through. It contains the information of the case she had worked six years ago, complete with a list of people who were convicted, those who made it out of court without jailtime and lastly a page with the picture and some information on Neufers.

He looks up at his partner. “Where do you want to start?”

She grabs one of the papers displaying the picture of a young woman. “This is Neufers’ girlfriend. Or at least she was. She claimed she had no idea of what he was doing and was judged not guilty. I hope he tries to make contact again. Afterwards, I was thinking about tracking down his mother and talking to her.”

Jake quickly goes through the assembled information again but can’t see any better leads. 

Amy is already halfway to the elevator when he looks back up. “Are you coming, or do I have to do all the work myself?”

He grumbles, grabs his jacket from the back of his chair and follows her. “Title of your sex tape.”

\-------------------------------------------------------

The girlfriend is home but hasn’t seen Neufers since he came back and claims that she hasn’t heard from him either. 

They try talking to Neufers’ mother, but she isn’t home. Neighbors inform them that she is likely to return late in the evening. Amy asks them to tell her to contact them and leaves a card with her contact info behind. 

“Do you really think she’ll just show up at the precinct tomorrow?”

“If we’re lucky.” Amy shrugs. “If not, we’ll just come by another day. She’s old and sick, I don’t think that she will try and run away from us. Plus, she cooperated very well the last time around.”

They drive back to the precinct to do some more research about the other people included in the case. They get more files out of the lockup and at the end of their shift they have a list of people to visit and question the next day.

They shut down their computers and are making idle conversation on their way to the elevator when Jake suddenly stops. Amy notices and looks back at her partner, who is frantically patting himself down. “What’s it this time, Peralta?”

Jake, who has successfully put his hands in each and every of his pockets, looks up at her with a careful grin. “I lost my keys.”

Amy groans. “Jake! This is the third time in two months! How are you a functioning adult?”

“I… I can find them – because I’m a great detective. Let’s see… I definitely had them when we came back from the girlfriend, since we used my car and that doesn’t drive without the keys…. What did we do after that?”

“We sat at our desks for a while, went to the evidence lockup…”

Jake snaps his fingers, interrupting Amy. “Right! I used my mini-flashlight to see what lay under the shelf.”

Amy stares blankly at him.

“It was a dead rat.”

She throws up her hands. “I didn’t need to know that”, she exclaims but follows Jake to the evidence lockup. 

His keys lie on the floor in the back of the room and Jake picks them up with a triumphant “Aha!”

He turns on the little flashlight on his keychain and points the light at Amy.

“See? Told you, I would find it.” He grins.

Amy just rolls her eyes. “Yes, you did. But last time you left it at Shaw’s because you had to prove that you are cool enough to have a bottle opener on your keychain. You had to crash on Gina’s couch and only got it back because Hank recognized it and called you.”

“Well, but that was only one time!”

“The time before that you left it at the Hot dog stand down the street because you used your stupid mini folding ruler to measure if Boyles sausage was as long as yours.”

“Title of your sex tape? Nah, doesn’t really work.”, Jake chimes in. Amy hits him lightly in the chest. 

“It took the two of you three hours to get it back! With all the stupid gadgets you have on this keychain, why doesn’t it have a tracker so you can actually find it?”

“I’ve always found it so far.”

“But you can’t put a tracker on it after you lost it for good. You might want to try and plan ahead for the next time.”

Jake just shakes his head as he passes Amy and makes his way back to the elevator. “Where would be the fun in that?”

_In moments like these, Amy has to remind herself that it is heavily frowned upon to strangle one’s ward, no matter how annoying they might be._

\--------------------------------------------------------------------

When Jake enters the bullpen the next morning, Amy is already sitting at her desk. He smiles at the sight of her. Working was always more fun when he got to it with her, and he is happy that their current case would probably have them working together for a while.

As he sits down, Amy notices him and stretches one arm towards him, palm up. “Keys.”

For a moment, Jake just stares at her over their joined desks. “What?”

“Give me your keys.”

Jake fishes his keychain out of his jacket and tosses it towards his partner. It bumps into her coffee and Amy catches her cup, throwing him an irritated look. 

She takes a small paper box out of her bag and empties the contents onto her desk. She throws the box at Jake, who catches it and reads the label. 

“A key tracker? Seriously, Amy?”

Amy, who has finished attaching the tracker to the chain smiles sweetly at him. “So you can stop wasting the time of everybody in this precinct and concentrate on your actual work.” She throws the keychain at him. “My bodega just happened to sell them, and I happened to be thinking of you.”

He grins at her. “Well, well, well, Santiago. Do you always think of me when you go grocery shopping? Or is it that you are always thinking of me, whatever you do?” Amy is blushing and Jake revels in the feeling. “Because really, I am flattered.”

“I’m not…” Amy is visibly seeking for some comeback and becoming more and more flustered in the process.

Jake enjoys seeing her like this. It supports his hopes that she might feel something for him as well, that maybe there could be a chance for the two of them along the road. It sparks a funny feeling in his chest that doesn’t really die down these days, just flickers up whenever she is around him and dims a little when he is alone. 

He knows that he is in deep and that it isn’t necessarily healthy that he has given up every intention of getting over his feelings for her. But some part of his brain argues that this is a problem for future Jake and that present Jake is happier if he allows himself that glimmer of hope. Present Jake knows that future Jake will hate him for this, but again… future Jake’s problem.

He glances down at the package Amy had thrown at him, detailing how to link the tracking device with an app he could download on his phone. He throws it in his desk drawer without reading it, earning even more flustered stammering from Amy.

“Peralta, Santiago!”, Terry’s voice sounds through the bullpen. “There is a woman in interrogation room three for you. Carla Neufers.”

Jake looks at Amy with a stunned expression on his face. “The mother! She showed up. I didn’t think she’d come.”

A sudden smile blooms on Amy’s face and Jake knows what his partner is going to say before she even opens her mouth. “ _I didn’t think she’d come_ , title of your sex tape!”

\--------------------------------------------------

The mother turns out to be another dead end. Her son hasn’t contacted her, and her memory isn’t the best anymore.

She leaves with the promise to call them should she hear something, and Jake and Amy find themselves back at their desks with no new leads.

“Do you really think she’d give up information on her son?” At the sound of his voice, Amy looks up at him.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“She is his mother. He faces a lifetime in jail. Wouldn’t a mother try to protect her son, if possible?”

“Well, her son smuggled drugs and is responsible for at least four murders. I imagine that she lost her maternal instincts at some point. Everybody has to draw a line somewhere.”

Charles, obviously bored by his actual assignment, rolls over on his chair. “I read that even angels sometimes abandon their wards when they do something truly awful.”

Jake sighs. While guardian angels are among Charles’ favorite topics, Amy tends to be strangely silent whenever the topic comes up. He’s learned to just not talk about them in her presence, but the rest of the squad hasn’t caught on to that yet. It doesn’t take long for the entire team to be assembled around his and Amy’s desks to discuss the strange beings that protect humankind.

“Can’t really blame them”, Rosa states. At Charles’ dramatic gasp, she just rolls her eyes. “What? If the ward’s an asshole, running around, murdering people, I would abandon them, too. Just because they are celestial beings” – she makes a very unenthusiastic wiggling motion with her fingers – “doesn’t mean they have to put up with all that crap. Plus, when the angels abandon our perps, the perps are easier to catch, I assume.”

Charles disagrees – of course he does. “But doesn’t that defeat the purpose? Having a guardian angel means that there is someone who will protect you no matter what, doesn’t it? Plus, if they really think their ward is doing something wrong, why don’t they do something about it themselves?”

To Jake’s surprise, Amy jumps into the conversation. “You love Guinevere, right?”

Charles nods enthusiastically. “Yes! Last night, we…”

“Nobody wants to hear that, Charles!”

Amy shoots Rosa a grateful look. “If she killed someone, would you still love her?”

Boyle is obviously taken aback by the question. “I… think so? Yes? Probably? If it were an accident…” 

“But what if it isn’t an accident? If you came home tonight to a dead body in your bathtub and the woman you love told you that she murdered that person in cold blood and that she would kill again as soon as she left your sight. Would you still love her?”

It has become very still in the bullpen while Amy talked. Everybody is staring at her while she calmly regards her coworker. 

Boyle gulps. “Well…” He struggles for words, but it is obvious that none will come. 

“Different question: Would you stop her? Put her in handcuffs and throw her in jail since she has confessed to a crime and is obviously guilty?”

“I honestly don’t know if I could do that.”

“What _would_ you do? Let her run around, let her murder a bunch of other people like you knew nothing about it?”

Charles wordlessly shakes his head.

“What about: calling Jake, telling him everything, keeping an eye on Guinevere, waiting for Jake to show up and stepping aside to allow him to do his job, to take her in?” Amy’s voice has become soft, but in the eerie silence of the bullpen, it’s as if she was shouting.

Charles nods slightly. “Yeah”, he finally croaks out. “I guess I’d do that.”

“Don’t you think angels deserve that chance as well? To distance themselves from the situation and allow others to do what they might not be able to? All accounts state that an angel has a very strong bond to those they are send to protect.”

There is a long silence while they all ponder Amy’s words.

“I suppose you’re right”, Charles finally concedes.

“Wow, Santiago, that was dark.” Rosa grins at the other woman. “Didn’t know you had it in you.”

“And with this very unsettling compliment, could we please return to doing police work?” Amy makes a vague gesture towards her desk. “I’d like to finish on time.”

“ _I’d like to finish on time_ , Title of your sex tape!” The words are out of his mouth before Jake can stop himself. Charles gives him a high-five, Amy groans and Rosa raises a single eyebrow. 

But the strange mood that had previously taken over the bullpen is broken, and they soon disperse to go back to their previous tasks.

Amy is staring blankly at her screen and Jake has no idea what to do or say to lift her mood as well. It was strange to hear her participate in a discussion on angels at all, and the course the conversation had taken was … strange. 

Amy glances up at him, but instead of immediately looking back at her screen as he assumed, she actually holds his gaze. She sits a little bit straighter than she does anyways, pushes her shoulders back and her chin forwards. She’s preparing for an argument or a joke, he realizes. 

But he doesn’t really disagree with her and he can see that – for some reason he doesn’t understand – this is important to her.

So he simply smiles at his partner.

Amy’s shoulders sag just a fraction and her expression turns soft. She returns his smile and they both go back to work.

_Amy knows she shouldn’t have gotten so riled up by the topic. But something in her partner’s smile makes her think that it wasn’t too bad that she did._

\----------------------------------------------------------

It takes two weeks to question people, stake out locations and go through all leads, but nothing offers any results. 

Then one morning, Jake enters the bullpen to a smiling Amy Santiago.

“What has you so happy? Did the department order new binders?”

Amy scoffs at him. “No, one of my informants just called, he saw Neufers.”

“That’s great! What are we waiting for?”

“I actually was waiting for you. My guy saw Neufers enter an apartment building a couple of hours ago, didn’t have his phone with him so he couldn’t call immediately. I looked it up, one of his former lackeys lives there.” Amy glances at a paper lying in front of her. “Bill Schneider. Used to manage the finances, got free because of a technicality.” She is already getting out of her chair and pulling on her jacket. “Let’s go.”

“But…” Jake eyes the bagel and the coffee he had just bought on his way in. “My breakfast is still warm!”

Amy levels an unimpressed glare at him. 

“I can eat in the car”, he suggests.

“You shouldn’t drive and have breakfast at the same time, Jake. It’s not safe.”

He rolls his eyes. “Then you can drive.”

“You know you are not allowed to eat in my car! You always mess it up and I just vacuumed it a couple of weeks ago.” Amy is starting to sound exasperated. 

Jake thinks about it for a moment. “We can take my car, you drive, I have breakfast on the way. Sounds good?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

Jake fishes his keychain out of his pocket and hands it over. “Perfect.”

The apartment building is in a bad state and mostly abandoned. Jake and Amy circle it once before going in. They find the front door unlocked and make it to the apartment door without running into anyone.

Jake knocks on the door and takes a step back to wait for an answer. None comes. He knocks again. “NYPD, open up!”

He can hear someone moving inside but the door stays shut. He exchanges a quick glance with Amy, then he throws his shoulder against the door. It creaks under his weight but doesn’t open.

He holsters his gun and takes a couple of steps back. Amy slightly raises her gun, ready to take on any attacker while he is unarmed. Even in this situation, it warms his heart how safe he feels with her. And even in this situation he realizes that he has way too many romantic feelings for his partner who doesn’t want to date cops.

When he barrels into the door for the second time, it yields to his weight and springs open. While he rolls over his shoulder to get back up in a cool move, he hears Amy storm inside the apartment behind him.

“NYPD, you are under…” She interrupts herself with a sharp gasp.

As Jake rolls onto his feet, he finds himself face-to-face with two guns. They found Neufers – but their perp wasn’t unprepared. 

Jake slowly raises his hands while Amy slowly puts her gun down.

Jake’s mind runs a mile a minute, thinking of ways out of this. They were evenly matched in numbers – that was good, wasn’t it? Better than being outnumbered, at any rate. He still had his gun, safely hidden in his holster where he couldn’t reach it without drawing attention to himself. At least they were both still unharmed so far? Of course, that was the exact moment his shoulder begins to throb where he had rammed it into the door twice.

“Amy Santiago”, Neufers sneers. “You took down my organization, now I’m taking you down.”

“Whoa there, buddy”, Jake interjects. “Killing a cop? You really don’t want to do that, man.”

Both men look over at him. Neufers makes a short motion towards Jake with his head, not lowering his gun. The other guy – probably Schneider – comes over to Jake and takes his gun out of its holster. 

Jake briefly thinks about attacking him and taking him down. He’d probably have a good chance of succeeding. But Neufers still has his gun trained on Amy and Jake can’t risk her being shot because of him. So, he doesn’t put up much of a fight as Schneider pushes him towards the heater and cuffs him to it. 

Then Schneider returns to Neufers’ side and points his gun at Amy.

Amy, for her part, is looking rather calm. Jake knows that she is probably freaking out on the inside – who wouldn’t, with a gun to their head?

Where Jake is cuffed to the radiator, he is only in the periphery of the men’s vision. If he moves slowly, he might get to his phone without them noticing.

“Let’s talk about this, Neufers.”, Amy tries to reason. “I’ve found you six years ago, I found you today. Even if you take me out, my team will find you again. Don’t put murdering a police officer on your list of crimes.”

Neufers isn’t backing down, but he isn’t trying to make Amy stop talking either. 

“Plus, you already have me unarmed and at gunpoint. You can just cuff me to the radiator, next to my partner and make a run for it. That way, you get the same head start but your case won’t go to major crimes for killing a police officer.” 

Amy has an amazing poker face, that much Jake has to admit. She is still blankly staring down the barrel of two guns, calmly trying to talk the two men down. Jake is beyond impressed. He has one hand in his jeans pocket, securely wrapped around his phone. Were it in the pocket of his jacket, he might try to blindly text someone but there isn’t enough room in his jeans. He slowly begins to pull the phone out of his pocket.

“Why would I care if it’s you guys or major crimes? Neither of you will find me again.”

“Well, the major crimes division has so much more resources than the normal detectives and will probably find you much quicker than my squad. Plus, they might try to talk to your mother again and she didn’t seem to be very healthy the last time I saw her…”

“Don’t talk about my mother!”, Neufers shouts.

It actually surprises Jake enough that he drops his phone on the ground. All three heads whip towards him. At the sight of the phone on the floor next to his captive, Neufers’ face turns stormy. He marches over to Jake and kicks his phone away while Schneider still holds Amy at gunpoint.

Before Jake can react, the grip of Neufers’ gun connects harshly with his temple and everything goes black. The last thing he registers is Amy’s sharp gasp as he loses consciousness.

\----------------------------------------------------

Jake wakes to a massive headache and an empty apartment. His phone lies a couple of feet from him and that is good, but so does Amy’s, which means they have no way of tracking her. Probably the reason it was left behind. 

Jake is immediately overcome by worry for his partner. They should have brought backup, he scolds himself. He shouldn’t have put away his gun when he tried to ram down the door, he shouldn’t have let Amy fend for herself even for a moment. The rational part of his brain says that there was no way he could have known about any of this, no reason to act any differently to how they did.

He still blames himself for Amy’s … what? Kidnapping? He decides to stick with kidnapping for the time being, because he doesn’t dare to think about the alternative.

Criminals have taken the woman he lo- likes and he might have missed his last chance with her. Gone was the chance of her changing her mind and allowing herself to date cops again. Gone was the possibility of him going up to her and asking her out, no-cops-rule be dammed. If she really doesn’t want to date him, she’d have to tell him to his face, and he’d back up for good.

Jake can feel himself spiraling and reaches for his phone. It’s just outside his reach, so he lies flat on his stomach, scuttles backwards until he can reach it with his foot and carefully nudges it closer to the radiator.

He calls Terry and twenty minutes later, the apartment is swarming with cops. One of them frees Jake’s wrist from the handcuffs while he retells this morning’s events to the Sargent.

“Terry does not like that. Do you have any idea where they could have taken her?”

Jake shakes his head. “No, we only found this apartment thanks to one of Santiago’s snitches.”

They can’t find any leads about where the men could have taken Amy in the apartment, so Terry drives them back to the precinct where they brief the rest of the squad. There is no pushback as all available resources are dedicated towards finding Amy.

They reach out to informants, watch through hours upon hours of traffic camera footage and security footage from stores in a two-block radius from the damned apartment, but they find nothing.

Terry tries to make Jake go and see a doctor for his head wound, but Jake refuses to leave. “She’s my partner and I will find her”, he says and gets back to work.

When Terry realizes that he won’t change the detective’s mind, he gets the package of frozen peas out of the break room cooler and puts them on the lump forming on Jake’s temple. Jake smiles gratefully and continues to work.

The day passes slowly, but it passes. When he realizes in the afternoon that Jake has yet to eat lunch, Charles buys food from the vendor down the street and makes Jake take a ten-minute break in the break room.

“You have to get away from this for a couple of minutes”, he argues. “Otherwise, you won’t be able to concentrate anymore, and you might miss something.”

Jake eats the food without tasting it. It wasn’t like he could concentrate one way or the other. Not with Amy missing, not with her being in danger, possibly in pain. He still refuses to even think about the fact that she might be dead already.

“Maybe she has a guardian angel looking out for her”, Charles tries to cheer him up. “Who knows?”

Jake doesn’t answer. He wants to believe that Amy is all right, that a celestial being swooped in the moment he was knocked unconscious and saved her. He really does. But what are the odds? He thinks about the many times Amy had swooped in and saved his life. How she had taken down perps who hadn’t seen her coming, talked him down from doing too stupid stunts or just smiled at him when he was ready to give up on a case. Jake doesn’t need an angel as long as he has Amy. 

And he will do anything in his power to be there for her in return.

Boyle falls silent as they eat, for once in his life picking up on social cues and not wanting to pressure Jake into a conversation.

By the time Hitchcock and Scully go home – “Scully needs to take his meds and they make him too drowsy to drive and he’ll fall asleep shortly after”, Hitchcock explains – Jake has gone through every piece of paper on Amy’s desk in hopes of finding something useful.

By the time Terry goes home – “My wife is out, and our sitter is sixteen and needs some sleep herself” – the bag of frozen peaches isn’t frozen anymore and has left a wet spot on the desk where Jake has dropped it after it stopped soothing his pain.

Captain Holt tells him to call should he find or need anything as he leaves. He gives Jake’s shoulder what is probably supposed to be a reassuring pat and leaves. “I have to look after Cheddar, since Kevin is in Paris.”

Jake understands why all of them leave, he really does. They have a life outside of work, someone to look after who waits for them at home. Jake has to look after Amy, so he makes himself another coffee and gets back to work.

Rosa finally leaves late in the evening after having exhausted every lead Jake gave her to work on. “I’ll just grab a couple hours of sleep, I’ll be back soon”, she tells him. “Don’t do anything stupid in the meantime. Try to get some sleep yourself.”

Boyle doesn’t leave and Jake feels a wave of affection towards his best friend. He video-calls Nikolaj for bedtime and goes back to working the case immediately afterwards. Charles finally falls asleep on the couch in the break room well into the night.

Jake is tired as well, he can’t concentrate, and he knows that he probably wouldn’t find a clue if it jumped at him in his current state. He’s drunken many cups of coffee, even started doing some jumping jacks to keep awake. 

But at some point in the dead of night, even Jake Peralta has to admit that he can’t stay awake forever. He opens his desk drawer to pull out the lonely pillow he keeps there and freezes as he lays eyes on a small paper box.

His drowsiness vanishes immediately as he takes the box and flips it over. Amy had driven them to the apartment, she hadn’t given him his keys back before entering the apartment. And in front of him were the instructions on how to find the little GPS-tracker Amy had installed on his keychain. Although he didn’t think he’d ever use it, he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of Amy’s present either. _Maybe the pining was good for something after all_ , he thinks as he grabs his phone and downloads the app. 

_As soon as this is over, I’m going to ask Amy to go out with me_ , he decides while scanning the code on the box to link the app to the right tracker.

A little blinking dot appears on the screen of his phone and he finally – _finally!_ – has Amy’s location.

He tries to wake Boyle, but his best friend is fast asleep and no power in the world seems to be able to wake him.

Jake grabs the keys to one of the police vehicles and fires some quick texts to Captain Holt, Terry, and Rosa.

Had he been more awake, he might have asked some of the uniformed officers to back him up, but in his sleep-deprived state, he leaves alone to save his partner.

\------------------------------------------------------

The tracking app leads Jake to a car repair shop which is closed for the night. He sneaks around the building and finds a side entrance unlocked. 

The building is mostly empty, two cars stand in the middle of the garage. A weak light shines from the small office on the other end of the room. As he looks around the shop, Jake notices a surveillance camera covering most of the floor and the entrance to the office. 

He doesn’t know who is watching the video-feed and doesn’t want to alert Neufers to his presence yet.

The detective sneaks up to the camera and slowly pushes it down, so it records the floor. Should someone watch the video-feed, they’ll hopefully think the holding mechanism has loosened which may buy him an extra couple of minutes.

Camera dealt with, Jake tiptoes over to the office door and carefully peaks through the blinds of the little window.

Unfortunately, he can’t see much of the room. A single light bulb illuminates a small desk and a huge cabinet dividing the room and shielding most of it from Jake’s eyes. But on the far side of the room, next to a house plant and bound to a chair with her hands behind her back, is Amy. She is blankly staring at the backside of the cabinet which Jake can’t see.

Adrenaline rushes through his body, as well as relief. He found her. He finally found Amy and she appears to be unharmed. He made it to her in time. He just has to get her out of here.

Jake doesn’t know where Neufers is, but he must assume that the smuggler isn’t far. He might have to hurry. Maybe he should have waited for backup, but it was too late for that now.

He carefully pushes the door open. Amy doesn’t notice him, her eyes still trained on something behind the cabinet that he can’t see. 

The door closes behind him with a small _klick_ and Amy’s head whips towards him. He only has a moment to register the look on her face not as he had anticipated as one of relief but as one of panic.

Neufers appears from where he was previously standing behind the cabinet. And he is pointing a gun at Jake.

“We have to stop meeting like this”, Jake tries to joke. But it falls flat, even to his own ears. He is closer to Amy then Neufers is, but in this situation, with a gun to his head, that is of no use to him or Amy.

His partner frantically looks from Neufers to Jake and back to her kidnapper. Jake knows that look, she usually displays it while deciding whether to follow their Captain’s order or follow her instincts and go behind his back. Which means that she might actually have a plan on how to get out of here and Jake probably blew it.

Or did he help it? Should he stall? Coming here after a way too long day, sleep-deprived and off his game might not have been his smartest move.

“Don’t worry, there won’t be a next time”, Neufers answers him and aims the gun at Jake’s head.

There is a ripping sound, and he can see Amy rushing towards him, surrounded by something huge and violet he can’t quite make out. In the same moment Amy barrels into him, there is a gunshot. Everything goes dark.

But there is no pain, and the small grunt Amy expels doesn’t sound like someone who was just hit by a bullet either. 

A second gunshot rings in his ears and Jake finally manages to open his eyes again. He can’t even remember shutting them.

The first thing he sees is Amy’s face _very_ close to his. She has a stern expression, her eyebrows knitted together, her mouth set in a scowl. She doesn’t meet his gaze, instead looking over her shoulder in the direction Neufers was standing in. That draws Jake’s attention from his partner’s face and all coherent thought leaves his mind.

What he sees isn’t the office and the criminal they were chasing. Instead, he is looking at a giant wing with luscious violet feathers cocooning him and Amy.

After a second of not thinking anything at all, it feels like his brain is trying to think everything at once. His mind is racing, from the wing in front of him to the woman it just has to belong to – even if it makes no sense, he knows her, she is Amy – to all the times she had retreated into herself when angels were discussed, to all the times she had saved him in the past, to the stories their colleagues had told where Amy had come to their rescue – she did that a lot, and never took credit for it.

In hindsight, maybe it wasn’t so unbelievable for Amy – smart, brilliant, strong, fierce Amy – to be a guardian angel.

While Jake is still trying to take in all the information, Amy grabs his gun which he voluntarily lets go. 

There is the sound of a third gun shot, this time followed by a scream. 

The wall of violet feathers around Jake vanishes and he can see Neufers, clutching his right shoulder, where a red stain appeared on his shirt and is steadily growing. He drops his gun to the ground and Amy pushes the gun she just fired back into Jakes hand and rushes towards her kidnapper, kicking the gun away from him.

Jake just stares. The weight of his gun is familiar in his hand and so are the red and blue lights that suddenly fill the room. There is a crash as the door behind him flies open and police officers storm the office that suddenly feels crammed. 

He feels a hand on his shoulder and jumps, but it’s just Charles, who beams at him. “You found her!”

Jake nods numbly. “Yeah, I did.” His eyes are still trained on Amy, who cuffs the perp, hands him over to two uniformed officers and gets a once-over by Rosa who must have arrived at the same time as Charles and the officers.

“Are you okay?” Charles’ voice pulls him back from his musings and he forces himself to focus on his best friend instead of his partner-turned-guardian-angel.

“Yeah, I…” He looks over at Amy again, who shoots him a nervous look. “I’m running on too little sleep, too much coffee and possibly an untreated concussion.”

He knows, somewhere in the back of his mind, that guardian angels are not supposed to reveal themselves to humans and that they can erase a person’s memory if necessary. He also knows that if he tells Boyle and everyone else in this room what he saw, she will probably vanish, and he’d never see her again.

So, he keeps his mouth shut, even when all he wants to do is to talk about this new-found knowledge with _someone_.

He allows Charles to lead him outside and sits in the back of an ambulance while a paramedic checks him for major injuries. Neufers is being loaded into a second ambulance and driven off towards the hospital with an escort.

Jake doesn’t register much after that. He is coming down from his adrenalin rush, his head wound from earlier and his fatigue catching up to him. He remembers getting into the passenger seat of Charles’ car and being driven off the scene. 

They don’t drive to the precinct, as Jake had suspected, but to the hospital where his best friend insists that “you are completely out of it, Jake, you haven’t heard a thing I said the entire ride here and I’m afraid that this head wound is worse than you want it to be.”

They are told to sit in a waiting area where Jake fills out some forms while Boyle babbles about how he woke up to an empty bullpen and Rosa’s texts blowing up his phone. He had grabbed some of the uniformed officers and arranged with Rosa to meet at location. Just as he tells Jake how they arrived at the car shop and heard the gun shots, a nurse calls Jake in to get checked out.

Charles waves him away with an “I probably should call Rosa and ask how everything is going”.

The doctor tells Jake that he has a severe concussion and admits him to stay in the hospital overnight. He is passed on to a nurse who shows him to his room and gives him pain meds. “You take these, drink at least one bottle of water and sleep it off. You’ll feel better afterwards, and you can probably leave in the morning.” She puts two pills and a bottle of water on the small desk next to the bed. “Those pills might make you drowsy, so if you need to call someone, do it before you take them. If anything is up, just press the button.” She gestures towards a small device with a singular red button and a cable attached to it.

It doesn’t take five minutes after the nurse leaves for Charles to find him. “So, I heard you’ll stay the night?”

Jake is too tired to argue right now, so he just nods. “Did you get Rosa?”

“No, I talked to Captain Holt, actually. He apparently got woken up by the messages Rosa and I sent him and drove to the precinct to check in on everything and talk to Amy in person.”

Jake can’t help but ask. “How is she?”

Charles grins and Jake knows that his concussion is the only reason he doesn’t start the _you-like-Amy-and-you-should-tell-her_ -speech. “Amy is fine. She made her statement, told the Captain what happened. Good job by the way, shooting that guy in the shoulder before he actually hit someone! Holt has given her the day off; Rosa has taken her home. Holt says she seemed a bit shaken, but she’ll probably get over it soon.”

Jake opens his mouth but closes it again. Amy had told Holt that _he_ shot Neufers? Well, it made sense if she didn’t want anybody to know about… 

It all rushed through him again and Jake got a little dizzy just by thinking about the day’s events. The pills on his nightstand are starting to look very appealing.

“What about me?”, he asks while he takes the pills.

“Holt wants you to come in as soon as you get out of the hospital to give your statement. But he’ll probably give you the day off as well.”

Jake swallows his pills and drinks some water. “Well, then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“It’s actually three in the morning, sooo…”

“I’ll see you later today.”

Charles stands to leave but stops at the door as Jake addresses him again. “Hey, Boyle? Thank you for everything.”

Then the drowsiness of the pills hits him, and he drifts off to sleep. He dreams of guns and angels and for once, he isn’t the hero of the story.

_Across town, Amy Santiago has the meltdown of a lifetime. She didn’t want to leave this life, but she had revealed her true self to one of her charges and as soon as this became public knowledge, she’d get transferred. Lying to Captain Holt delayed the inevitable, but as soon as Jake gives his statement to the Captain, all of this would be over._

\-----------------------------------------------------------

When Jake wakes, he feels much better. The doctor clears him and signs his paperwork to leave the hospital. 

Jake wants nothing more than to talk to Amy, but he knows that he has to go to the precinct first to give his statement.

He takes an Uber to the 99th, since his car is still at the apartment Amy got kidnapped in and his partner still has his keys. 

As he walks into the bullpen, he draws the eyes of everyone in the room. Charles hugs him, Terry proudly pats him on the back and he even receives a nod from Rosa.

Among all of this, Captain Holt appears in his office door and calls him over. “Detective Peralta. I am glad you are well. I just need your statement, then you can leave for the day.”

Jake thinks about objecting, saying he is fit to work. But it is already noon and he really needs to talk to Amy. So, he sits down in the chair his Captain offers him and begins his story. 

He recounts how Amy had put the tracking device on his keys weeks ago and how she had his keys on her during the kidnapping since she had driven his car to the apartment. He talks about how he had forgotten about it until he found the box with the instructions in his drawer. Captain Holt frowns as Jake tells him that he went in alone but sent texts to everyone for backup. He slows down as he gets to the part in the shop and what happened after he entered the office.

“Neufers was suddenly right in front of me, and he had a gun. That guy must be a horrible marksman, because he fired a couple of times without hitting anything. I got him in the shoulder, he went down, and that was when Charles and Rosa came rushing in.”

Holt listens carefully to his story. Jake prays for a moment that Amy’s story was similar enough to his that they didn’t raise any red flags. 

“Detective Santiago told me Neufers didn’t hit anything because she had thrown some soil at him and the man was distracted?”

Jake curses internally. Of course, Amy had made up a believable excuse that the guy couldn’t hit a target not ten feet away from him.

“Yes… Well, with all due respect, Sir, I wasn’t paying much attention to Santiago at that moment because someone was trying to shoot me.” Jake gives Holt his _what-are-you-gonna-do-about-it-_ smile and the Captain just rolls his eyes. 

“Very well. Good work out there, but please remember to bring back up next time.” Jake doesn’t know if he just imagines it, but there seems to be a hint of a smile on his Captain’s face. “You are dismissed. I expect you to come in tomorrow morning bright and early, Peralta.”

“We both know that _Peralta_ and _early_ don’t go well together.”

The smile vanishes. “I said _dismissed_.”

And with that, Jake leaves the precinct. He needs to talk to an angel.

\--------------------------------------------------

The elderly lady who lives two doors down from Amy recognizes Jake as she leaves the building and lets him in. 

The whole elevator ride up, he thinks about what to say to her but as he arrives at her door and knocks, he still hasn’t come up with anything useful.

Before he had left to rescue her (not that she needed his help, as he learned), he had resolved to ask her out if they both made it through in one piece. He doesn’t know whether it would still be appropriate to do something like that.

It doesn’t take long for Amy to answer the door. She looks surprised when she spots him.

“Jake?”

He gives a small awkward wave. “Hi. I… You have…” Maybe he should have given more thought about what he was going to say. But he’d probably forgotten it as soon as he laid eyes on her anyways. “Can I come in?”, he finally asks.

Amy steps aside to let him into her apartment. He takes in the living room as he walks towards the couch, but he doesn’t sit down. The room looks like it always has, but with his newfound knowledge, all the little trinkets and the motivational posters don’t seem so out of place.

Amy had followed him into the room but stopped closer to the door, leaving a lot of space between them.

“How are you?”, she finally asks. 

“Fine. Had a concussion, but it’s better now. You?”

Amy absentmindedly scratches her back. “Well enough, I guess. Have you spoken to Captain Holt already?”

Jake nods and Amy looks stricken. She slumps against the doorframe and makes a vague sweeping hand gesture. “Then I guess all of this is over now.”

Jake is taken aback by her words. He didn’t want anything to be over. He didn’t want her to leave. She couldn’t just… “What do you mean?”

Amy straightens her posture as she answers him. “Well, if you have made your report to Captain Holt, that means that he now knows about my identity. It will most likely be put on my record and even if I don’t report it myself, word will get out and I will be reassigned within the week.”

“I didn’t tell him.”

“What?”

“I didn’t tell Holt about your…” Jake gestures towards where he guesses her wings would be.

Amy takes a step towards him. “He didn’t ask you to give a statement?”

“Of course, he did. But Charles said that Holt said that you said that I shot the guy, and he didn’t hit anything, so that’s what I went with.”

“What exactly did you tell the Captain?”

“I told him that I came in there, gun blazing to rescue the fair maiden from the bad guy and that I succeeded all on my own like the hero I am.”

Amy’s face turns annoyed and somehow, it’s the best thing Jake has seen all day. Because if he is still able to annoy her, then he has a shred of normalcy to hold on to. He grins. “And as I assume that you wiped Neufer’s memory before Rosa got to him, your secret is safe.”

Amy shakes her head and Jake realizes that she might not believe that he won’t tell anybody else. It pains him that she doesn’t seem to trust him, but he knows how big a secret her true form is.

Her next words take him by surprise. “There was a camera in the shop, trained through the window. It most likely recorded everything.”

“No.”

“Jake, I saw it as I got in. I can’t erase that footage; it probably is too late for it anyways.”

“I noticed that camera, too, when I came in to heroically rescue you.”

“Like I needed rescue…”

“Well, I saw it and I didn’t want to risk Neufers seeing me approach on some video-feed, so I turned it towards the ground. It didn’t record anything but concrete and a box of screws while I was in the office.”

Now it’s Amy’s turn to open her mouth without speaking. It was a rare thing, to see Amy Santiago speechless. 

“So, Holt believed our stories have nothing to do with celestial interference and everything to do with good police work?”

Jake nods. “He seemed very proud of us.”

“And there is no camera footage?” She still seems skeptical.

Jake nods again.

“And you are the only human that knows what happened.”

Jake nods a third time. He watches Amy as she walks around the room, one hand absentmindedly scratching her back. Then a thought strikes him. “Does that mean that you’ll wipe my memory as well?”

Amy just waves him off. “Can’t do that to my wards.”

A warm and funny feeling explodes in Jake’s chest. He hadn’t really thought about who Amy was supposed to protect. But hearing that he explicitly is a member of her wards makes him insanely happy. Amy Santiago is watching over him and always will be. It makes him feel safer than he ever has.

“How many do you have?” The question is out before Jake can stop himself. Amy just shoots him a look, silently prompting him to elaborate. 

“Wards”, he says. “Is it just me or is it the precinct or is it all of Brooklyn?”

“It’s the squad. Well…” she pauses and looks over at him. “It’s not like I get a list of people who I’m supposed to protect and anyone else is just collateral. The inner circle – you, Rosa, Charles, Terry, and Holt – are my priority. Hitchcock, Scully, and Gina are kind of in the periphery of that. I couldn’t wipe your memories or hurt you, even if I wanted to. I am devoted to protecting you. The rest of the precinct aids with what we do, so I care about them, too. And as a police officer as well as a guardian, I made an oath to protect everyone, so…” 

Jake notices her starting to ramble and goes over to her. “Amy.”

There is a beat of silence. “Yes?”

“There is no physical evidence of your… metamorphosis, nobody suspects anything and I’m the only one who knows about it. If I promise – by anything dear to me, by orange soda and all the Die Hard movies – that I won’t ever tell anybody, would you still have to leave?”

“Well, the reassigning is to stop information from spreading. If there is no risk of anyone else finding out, I guess it would be all right if I didn’t report your knowledge and stayed at the 9-9.” Amy carefully smiles at him and it is the first smile of hers he has seen since they entered that damned apartment what seems like an eternity ago.

Jake embraces her and she laughs, returning the hug and burying her face in his shoulder. “Thank you”, she whispers. “I really didn’t want to leave.”

They stay like that for a moment. When they finally separate, they each take half a step back and smile at each other. Amy raises her hands and tucks her hair behind both ears simultaneously.

It makes Jake’s heart stop for a moment. He can still hear Rosa talking about Amy’s double-tuck, can still see her doing it when face-to-face with Detective Majors or Teddy. Now they are alone, in her apartment, and she is smiling up at him and everything is perfect. 

“Is that why you decided not to date cops?”

Amy nods slowly. “I already have a district to watch over. With Teddy, I became more and more involved with his part of town and that became very stressful after a while. And dating one of my charges seemed like a bad idea. I care for each of you very deeply and I didn’t know if I could keep my secret if I added a romantic component into the mix.”

Jake knows that she is talking about him specifically and it makes him giddy. If her secret was the reason they couldn’t be together and he had seen her wings, so that argument is invalid…

He takes a deep breath. “Would it be totally inappropriate if I kissed you right now?”

Amy blushes. “It is already totally inappropriate that you know about my wings and I’m not doing anything about it, so…” she lets her sentence trail off.

Jake raises a hand and gently caresses her cheek. “So, what you are saying is: propriety is overrated?”

Amy visibly fights a grin. “ _Propriety is overrated_ , title of your sex tape.”

Jake barks out a laugh and in the next moment, he feels Amy’s lips on his and her hands in his hair as she pulls him down into a kiss.

Kissing Amy Santiago is everything he ever dreamt of and more. Her lips are tender, and her hands feel amazing where they gently massage into his scalp. She presses her entire body against his and he can feel the soft curves of her form fitting nicely to his larger frame. 

He keeps one hand on her cheek and brings his other around to rest on her back. The moment his hand makes contact with her shoulder, she lets out a pained gasp and breaks the kiss.

Jake immediately backs off and raises both hands. “Did I hurt you?”

This really wasn’t how he had imagined his first kiss with Amy to end – and he had imagined many scenarios.

Amy shakes her head and grabs one of his hands. With her other hand, she scratches her back again. 

“Is it your back?”, he asks tentatively.

“I caught two bullets with my wings a good twelve hours ago. It’s… itchy.” She goes over to the entrance to the kitchen and rubs her back on the doorway like a cat. “Had I reported the incident, one of the other angels would have helped me with grooming. It’s hard to do alone.”

Jake watches her as she rubs up and down the doorframe. She looks very uncomfortable, and this is partly his fault.

“I could – and _please_ tell me if I’m crossing a line here – I could help you with grooming? If you want?”

Amy stills in her movements and considers him for a long moment. Jake is about to backtrack, tell her it was a stupid idea, when she opens her mouth.

“It’s kind of… an intimate process.” She is blushing again.

“Intimate like…” He doesn’t want to say sex. He doesn’t want to think that he had just propositioned her when they had just shared their first kiss.

To his relief, Amy seems to have understood what he was thinking and shakes her head. “It’s nothing sexual, it’s more like a massage.”

“Massages can be sexual”, Jake remarks and instantly wishes he hadn’t. “Sorry. But you have to admit that you and I are rather … intimate with each other?”

Amy gives him an indulgent smile. “It would be rather helpful”, she admits. “I can’t reach the spots and the itching will only get worse if nobody tends to them.”

“Okay…” Jake looks around the room, not quite sure what to do. “Should we do it here?”

Amy shakes her head. “Bedroom.” A surprised sound escapes Jake and Amy blushes even more. “It is just… the bedroom windows have better blinds, and I can sort of stretch out my wings on the bed. The couch is way too small for that.”

Jake leans in and kisses her again. The kiss is short and sweet and as he pulls back, Amy is smiling at him. “You really don’t have to try so hard to persuade me to get into bed with you, Santiago. I would have gone voluntarily.”

“ _Please_ don’t make me regret this.”

Jake follows Amy into her bedroom. It is very spacious, with a king-sized bed pushed to one wall and a wardrobe on the other side. Amy closes the blinds before returning and standing in front of her partner and ward.

“Are you sure about this?”, she asks him. 

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that question?” Jake knows that it is a huge show of faith on Amy’s part to willingly show him her wings in a non-threatening situation. “You saved my life. And even if you hadn’t, I’d always help you with anything.”

Amy smiles at him and then, from one moment to the next, the air around her shimmers and her wings appear.

The first time Jake had seen her wings, he didn’t have the time or the wits to really take them in. He now realizes how much he missed out the last time.

The wings sprout from her back, slightly below her shoulder blades. They reach a couple of inches over her head while the tips barely touch the floor beneath their feet. The feathers are of a brilliant, violet color, dark at the top and brightening towards the tips.

Amy ruffles her feathers and the movement is strangely familiar.

Jake reaches out with one hand to touch them but stops himself before he buries his hand in her plumage. “May I?”

Amy nods. Jake ever so slowly places his right hand on her wing next to her left shoulder. The feathers feel amazing. They are the softest thing Jake has ever touched, softer than velvet or clouds or anything he has ever touched before; they ripple beneath his fingers as he carefully strokes her.

Amy makes a satisfied hum and Jake repeats the motion. Her eyes fall shut. 

“Maybe you should lie down”, he suggests.

Amy nods but doesn’t move towards the bed until Jake removes his hand from her. She drowsily opens her eyes. She looks a little out of it. If this is how she gets after him caressing a small part of her upper wing for a few minutes, Jake was curious to see what an hour of dedicated massaging could do.

Amy turns around, narrowly missing him with her wings and plops down on her bed. For the first time, Jake is awarded with the sight of her wings from the rear side in all their glory. They seem to go straight through her shirt where they sprout from her back. When Jake experimentally moves the shirt, the angel giggles. “That tickles.” Jake resolves to ask her about it later and lets the shirt go.

Amy has extended her wings so far that they barely hang over the edge of the bed on both sides.

In her left wing, he can easily spot the two places where the bullets have hit.

The fact that his partner literally caught two bullets for him hits Jake. He never would have put her in harm’s way on purpose, but she willingly jumped in front of a gun to save his life. True, it didn’t kill her, but she was injured and a wave of guilt rushes through him. He’d do anything to make things better, especially since this was mostly his fault.

He goes to touch the burned feathers, but she flinches hard, her wing snapping back to be closely tucked into her side. 

“Sorry”, he gasps and turns towards the right wing. _Better to start with the unharmed wing_ , he tells himself. 

He plops himself down on the mattress next to the angel and sits cross-legged, carefully pulling her wing in his lap.

Jake starts at the point where the wing sticks out of the shirt, carefully trailing a single finger along the feathers.

Amy gives a small content sound at the touch. Jake repeats the movement first with two fingers, then with his entire hand. He receives a small hum at the touch and slowly begins working his way outwards. The plumage becomes thicker towards the top and Jake experimentally buries his hand in the small feathers there. The wing twitches slightly under his grip but quickly relaxes again. 

“That okay?”, he asks.

“Feels good”, Amy answers in a blissed-out voice. “Just surprised me.”

Jake moves one hand along the upper edge of her wing, burying in deep and massaging the muscle he feels underneath. With the other hand, he begins to stroke her lower feathers which are sleeker, straighter and longer than those at the top. He straightens the odd feather that sticks out in some way and receives another content sigh. 

He rakes his fingers down her wings, causing the feathers to slip back into place like liquid. Amy gives a small moan at the sensation.

He tries his best not to react to the little sounds she sighs into her pillow.

He works along her whole wing in that manner, making Amy hum contentedly beneath him.

When he reaches the outer edge, her body starts to shake with a barely contained movement. Jake stills in his actions.

“Tickles”, Amy explains. She has turned her head around far enough that they can properly look at each other. Her laughter has shaken her out of the blissful state she had been in and her eyes are bright and fond. Jake leans over to press a kiss to her cheek, but Amy turns her head and turns it into a proper kiss.

Jake is careful not to put any weight on her wing, but the angle is awkward, and he soon has to break the kiss. 

He climbs over her and settles on her other side. He carefully takes the injured wing and spreads it out before him like the other one was. Amy turns her head so she can watch him.

“I’ll be careful”, Jake promises and presses a kiss to her cheek. This time, she lets him.

He starts as before at the joint between back and wing and carefully works his way outwards. When he reaches the first bullet wound, he slows down to look at the damage. Some feathers are missing, others are askew or burned. The exposed skin is red and angry, and Jake presses the softest of kisses to it. 

Amy hisses but doesn’t retract her wings. Jake carefully pokes at one of the burned feathers that surround the wound. “What do I do with those?”

“The burnt ones have to go”, Amy explains. “They’ll fall out on their own if untended to, but they itch like crazy.”

“So, I just… pluck them?”

Amy nods, but doesn’t seem very happy about it. “Like ripping off a band-aid.”

Jake lets his gaze wander from the wound he was currently working on to the other angry spot. There were way too many burnt feathers to just rip them off and have Amy deal with the pain.

He buries is hands in the thick plumage on the upper edge of the wing and massages the strong muscles there until she relaxes, and her eyes become hooded. Then, while still massaging her with one hand, he firmly grips the base of one of the burnt feathers with the other and tugs.

Amy’s eyes snap open but she quickly relaxes back into the massage. Jake repeats the act and Amy alternates between content humming and small hisses whenever he plucks another feather out of her plumage.

While he works, Jake ponders the way their relationship has changed. It certainly was a huge show of trust that Amy not just allowed him in on her secret but let him touch her wings. He had no illusions of this being normal in any way and he reveled in the knowledge that Amy had such trust in him. It wasn’t just trust, either. He could see the affection clear on her face as she lay beneath him.

When he finishes with the second wound, he lets his hands linger. He doesn’t want this to end, doesn’t know what would happen next. 

Amy sleepily opens her eyes as he stops his ministrations.

“All done”, he states. 

For a long moment, Amy just stares back at him. Then, cautious not to hit him in the face, she tucks her wings in, so they are nestled to her back. 

The air around her wings begins to shimmer and in the next moment, they are gone. Amy sits up and mirrors his pose, sitting cross-legged on the bed.

“Thank you for…” she gestures towards her back where he could see her wings just a moment ago. 

Jake nods. He is hyper-aware of the fact that they are in bed together. They had kissed earlier and seemed to have agreed on going out together. Or was that just wishful thinking? Should he kiss her again? Kissing Amy while sitting in bed with her seemed… too forward?

The mood in the room has suddenly become very awkward and stilted.

“Sooo…”, Jake starts.

“This is weird”, Amy notes. Jake bobs his head in agreement.

His stomach growls and Jake is unkindly reminded of the fact that he hasn’t eaten since Boyle had forced a late lunch on him the previous day.

“Wanna get something to eat? I’m starving”, he asks, happy for an opportunity to break the stiff mood.

There is a relieved smile forming on Amy’s face as she answers. “Sure. There is this Italian place two blocks away I wanted to try.”

“Are you asking me out, Santiago?” Jake playfully bumps their shoulders together.

“Yes, I am. Don’t make it weird, Peralta.”

Dinner gets weird. Neither of them really knows what to talk about and for the first part of the date they sit mostly in uncomfortable silence.

Then they do the grown-up thing, get super drunk and go back to Amy’s place to have sex.

“Well, this is certainly not how I imagined this day going”, Amy states as they lie in bed naked afterwards. “I hope it wasn’t a mistake.”

“ _I hope it wasn’t a mistake_ , title of your sex tape”, Jake quips. Then he gasps. “Title of _our_ sex tape!”

\------------------------------------------

When Amy and Jake enter the precinct the next morning holding hands, the bullpen falls quiet.

The silence is finally broken by Gina. “Hah, I win! Boyle, you owe me twenty bucks.”

That seems to break the spell. Charles rushes towards them with an excited “Tell me _everything_!”

Amy simply lets go of Jakes hand, pushing past his best friend and sitting at her desk.

When he doesn’t start talking, Charles bombards him with questions. “What happened, exactly? When did it happen? How long has this been going on? Are you official? Did you have sex? Which position?”

“Charles!”

“Spill, Peralta”, Rosa prompts him. “Not the sex stuff, but I need to know how to make fun of you.”

Jake finally settles on answering what seems to be the easiest question. “Yes, this… _we_ are official.” He shares a smile with Amy and Charles coos.

“Took you long enough”, Rosa just says. But what else would she say? This was as much of an endorsement as Jake could have wished for.

“I need details”, Charles exclaims as Jake sits down at his desk.

“Well, I showed up at her place, offered to shampoo her hair and Amy was so enamored by the idea that she threw herself at me.”

Amy’s snort is drowned out by Charles’ excited squeal. “Really?”

Jake throws his hands in the air. “No, Charles. Not really.”

“But then…”

“Jake showed up at my place to thank me for keeping Neufers from shooting him dead. And while declaring his endless gratitude, he confessed his undying love for me and I figured it was worth a try”, Amy jumps in.

Charles gives a delighted gasp. “That’s…” he looks from Amy’s barely contained grin to Jake, who is outright laughing. “…not the truth, either, I presume?”

“No”, Jake admits. “I just went to Amy’s to get my keys back and she jumped me as soon as she opened the door. Barely had time to get out a _hello_.”

Charles turns a skeptical look towards Amy. She simply shakes her head.

“Just give me the truth”, Charles begs. “I need this, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep!”

“ _I need this, otherwise I won’t be able to sleep_ , title of your sex tape!”, Jake and Amy simultaneously rush to say. They high-five over their desks and return to work.

Boyle grumbles but leaves them alone for the moment, realizing that he won’t get the true story right now. He’d just ask again later.

\------------------------------------------------

It turns into one of those stories that are never solved. Charles never stops speculating, much to the entertainment of the happy couple. Unsurprisingly, he never even gets close to the truth.

\----------------------------------------------------------  
\----------------------------------------------------------

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked it, have a great day :)


End file.
